Page 334 - Crazy Monster Creators

Author Notes:

Guest Author's Note: "Every DM wants their villains to be memorable, with all sorts of hidden depths and intrigue. Of course, the PCs usually just try shooting them during their intro speech, or give them funny names, or simply ask, 'How much HP do we have knock off him before we get the loot?'

What are some memorable villains from your campaigns? Or even better, what were some villains that just fell flat?"

101 Comments:

Likely the most memorable villain I can think of, was surprisingly, a pc cleric I made to help the dm as a kind of team rocket.

She was called Annastrazia, after that one princess. A lizardwoman priestess of hextor. She was never quite against the party, but in the area so often making a profit out the problem. Zombies munching on folks, she'd be selling holy water given she knew the necromancer in question. It was hilarious though, as the pc's always tried to stop her, but never could, as she was just the luckiest son of a gun for good dice against the pcs when they tried. She would get nat 20's, and they would get nat 1's, fleeing when things got bad.

As for villains that fell flat, sadly, the void arc boss, ergh, im sorry, but plot armor sucks on a gmpc. I didn't mind his immunities, his other aspects, but giving him immunity to damage and forcing players to listen to the tirade and insta-deathing with body destruction, for smart mouth heckling because it wasn't time for the showdown, yeah, a bad villain in every way.

I had an idea for putting plot armor on a DMPC, but in a different kind of way- He was a bio-droid alien studying Earth. If he got killed, his ship would try to retrieve whatever was left and build another him. His memories would be based on the last "Backup" he made however, so he obviously never remembers any of his deaths.

The sad thing is that while Chrysalis was a great villain idea (being both a shapeshifter doppelganger and a succubus) and her army was rather reasonable as an idea, she wasn't actually very good in the show. Sure, she was hammy, but honestly her appearance ended up being a disappointment. The fact that she beat Celestia using the power of love, then not five minutes later made fun of other ponies for trying to use the power of love themselves to power magic, really made no sense; the whole fight with Celestia didn't work very well either because everyone else showed Mook Chivalry, and the fight with the changeling army was a shaggy dog story. The whole thing just wasn't very well executed, and her behavior was rather inconsistent.

Memorable Villain? I present: The Big Idea
Back when The Tick cartoon was running, one of his first villains was fighting a group called "The Idea Men". While the cartoon show was about comical silliness, I took it to a very dark level.

The Idea Men of *my* Superhero campaign were a group of wealthy inventors and scientists who were bored of life and decided to do villain for the thrill. The Big Idea was their leader, a man on the level of Tony Stark with intelligence and resources, but none of the alignment. The Idea Men unleashed really nasty creations such as the ED-210 defense robot(An upgraded 209 with better intelligence), Mazinger-C (Early prototype, had some flaws), and a vast array of energy weapons, jet packs, and at one point a nanoswarm that could inhabit vehicles and control them.

The PCs never ended a fight without severe blood loss. :3
Also, The Big Idea was never a villain for monologue or revealing his plans. He killed more heroes than any of the other super villains that HAD powers. And to think these are just rich guys with too much free time.

There is a good reason why you never often see those kinds of smart villains, because they can and do cause pc statistics that are downright scary. And why writing, they have to give doom the reed richards effect, as otherwise, he would be just that lethal, sadly. Capable of scarily stopping and even likely beating the best of heroes.

True, true. Luckily the PCs did eventually beat him. They got lucky with pinpointing his secret hideout and went for a direct attack with everything they got. Half the Idea Men were killed or apprehended and The Big Idea was supposedly killed as he was escaping in his zepplin.
Two PCs got killed in the fight though.

Too bad the campaign never got far enough for to bring him back as a "brain in a jar" kind of villain. I had a great setup for that reintroduction.

Honestly, she was the series villain in my opinion. The Fire Nation lost the war at the Boiling Rock. When Azula became insane and lost her abilities to manipulate people and see the world the way she did, the fire nation lost its best asset in the war. I'm not convinced the heroes could have beaten the fire nation with a competent Azula at the helm.

Did the Big Idea do his villainy because of boredom as well? Because becoming a villain out of boredom and then not doing the fun stuff like hammy monologues seems like wasting perfectly good entertainment.

Big Idea was pretty bored with life, but no he didn't do any of the usual hammy villainy. The other villains in his little club however... total hams.

Like his son, "After Thought" who wasn't nearly as smart as his dad and was captured after monologue about how the Heroes won't figure out the secret weakness of his death ray.... which he blurted out. XD

So when I create NPCs, even minor ones, I tend to give them little things... like a basic sense of self-preservation. Sure, some are fanatic cultists or orcish warriors ready to join Grummish in the afterlife, but especially anything which has at least human intelligence will scheme, plot, lay traps, negotiate... whatever they can do to achieve their aims.

So I had some PCs who had just hit 2nd level. They had been poking around town for a jobs, and one of the orchards to the north of town had an infestation of Kobolds. "No more than a dozen, we think, but we can't spare the men to dig them out of there," is what the captain of the guard told them. Which was true, there were only 10. 10 Kobolds is about a CR of 3, and I wanted them to have a challenge.

Those Kobolds had dug in though. They had razor wire over the main gate. They'd set a couple traps involving fallen logs. I'd picked out a spot as a likely hiding place for the PCs (they went for it, as predicted) which was "muddy" in that it had been soaked in oil, which they set fire to. They'd taken cover behind a tree they'd chopped down. It became trench warfare very quickly, no PC wanting to risk getting THAT many tiny spears in them. The PCs didn't even kill them all. The Kobolds fled when reduced to 3, set fire to the orchard as they were fleeing, and the PCs decided that THEY would rather not take responsibility for its condition and had to stay behind to put out the fire. They felt like they were lucky to escape with their lives.

The surviving Kobolds became recurring enemies, leading small bands of equally weak humanoids. They would lay traps. They would run away. They would strategically retreat, follow the PCs, and hit them when they were resting. (They got XP if the Kobolds genuinely fled, but not for a planned retreat) They would use terrain and local conditions. The PCs came to hate and fear Kobolds with a passion. Even today they will mutter epithets if they see Kobolds in a game or hear about some.

That reminds me of an encounter of my own with kobolds. They were (thankfully) less vicious, but 2 level 1 PCs versus eight entrenched kobolds is still frustrating. They'd set up a warren of tunnels under & around a small waycastle's ruins, and a VERY drunk merchant sent the wizard and I after them to get vengeance for him and loot for us. (This was a miniadventure designed to help me, the new player, catch up to the other four players, who were nearly to level 3, plus introduce the DM's 3rd DMPC - it was a large party, and our two characters were the ONLY primary spellcasters - an Orsimer [Elder Scrolls orc] Favored Soul of Obad-Hai, and a half-drow wizard with a rapier.)
I know I've told the story in detail before, so I'll content myself with comparing it to playing Whack-a-Mole versus Vietcong Ewoks.

Well, I once based a campaign around the minecraft map "The Monarch of Madness." The villain was, obviously, The Monarch of Madness. In my campaign, he was a wizard lich who had killed everyone in his kingdom and proceeded to use them as puppets. I remember the players saying that he was one of their favorite villains to date, so that's something.

Our dm had this cool story about these villains who all had different reasons to flood the Underdark. They were either going to kill us or make us run away but because we lost our monk from the deck of many things the backup ranger stole the show and proceeded to fill them with arrows while me and the cleric played distraction.

That day I wasn't Grenthul the Impressive, I was Grenthul the Impressed.

"death by ranger" seems to be a common occurrance for villains in your campaign; a similar role is played by my character in ours. He's a goliath barbarian specializing in hammers, and is pretty much the go-to guy for single-target damage. When the dice don't hate me, that is... Never giving up my Couters of Second Chances, because it's a terrible feeling to stack up all sorts of bonuses on a Rage Strike and have it miss. (Since I went Calm Fury for my Paragon Path, it doesn't even do half damage--the DM ruled that it doesn't expend the Rage power though, just the use-per-day of Rage Strike itself.)

Why do DM's think they can make PC's "run away" Monsters pretty much universally have higher movement speeds and can more easily get the ability to move and full-attack than players can. Running away from any fight is pretty much guaranteed suicide, at least in alpha strike rocket tag situations you have a chance to go first.

Not to mention that most PCs are certifiable psychopaths. The job description for 'adventurer' tends to involve a near-suicidal commitment to taking on ridiculous odds and leaving a trail of bloodshed in your wake on the path to victory, in my experience.

While I didn't make him, there was a recurring character--not even a villain, but more of an annoying almost-ally--named Baron Hart. His appearance would always be announced by the theme of the King of All Cosmos from Katamari Damacy. So when we had an actual villain, Pirate Lord Foushen, who used the same flamboyant clothing style, we announced HIS entrance with the same theme.

So much so that when I placed Foushen in my minicampaign in that world, that for a few horrible seconds as the opening strains of the King's theme wafted across the living room, the party thought it might be Baron Hart.

In the first campaign I ever played, our DM had us hunting dragons, mostly at the behest of a corrupt vizier as punishment/payment for accidentally destroying one of his vassal villages.

The vizier, however, was not out to kill us, as he sent along an NPC named Mattia, who was equipped with an "anti-dragon" staff which gave us a boost to a few stats when fighting dragons, made us immune to their fear effects, and absorbed the dragons' breath weapons.

As we're crossing the countryside, slaying dragons left and right, our bard, both in and out of game, kept asserting that the NPC had to be a bad guy. However, our DM assured us that this was not the case, he just wanted to run a dragon-slaying campaign.

Well, to make a long story short, we kill all the dragons, then have to defeat the vizier. We then find out who his was working for. Mattia stepped into the room, brandished her staff, and absorbed its energies as she morphed into a five-headed multicolored dragon, taking on her true form as the goddess Tiamat.

The irony in all this is, no one saw this coming. The day before this happened, our DM had finally managed to convince the bard, again both in and out of game, that Mattia was innocent.

To this day, the mini he used to represent her still strikes fear into our hearts, and though our group has had many other adventures since then, that campaign will always hold a special place in our hearts.

Denfinatly PK Pyro, while not a true villian, when I introduced him to the story the peron playing Melody who was the focus character of that ark jumped the second she entered a bar and saw another guy in red. Though the story PK Pyro would just up just to be a dick and pk players and kill npcs just cause he could. Even though he wasn't even the most powerful charact at only lvl 40 and Melody had a partner at 50 he made their lives hell without even trying to make their lives hell. Though in the arc before it i think Teliko the player team's theif/dancer was often considered the big bad because her speach skills was so high she could get them to do anything she wanted, incuding convincing the entire team to multi class as dancers and open a beothon to earn easy quick cash

I don't play much DnD, but I do play a lot of White Wolf. I was running a White Wolf Exalted game when I had come up with my greatest villain ever that none of my players expected.

My players had spent literally months running around the world, fighting all these mini-bosses and piecing together a key to unlock a tower in the underworld where their power could be combined to stop the resurrection the main villain introduced rather early in the game called The Black Dragon, a huge Anklok Dragon King corrupted by the powers of the Underworld. Essentially, he was a Death Lord made out of a Dragon King, and all the mini-bosses were his lackeys based after the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

At the beginning of the campaign, I had asked them to make a full Circle of exalted, one of each caste. But the guy who drew the short straw was stuck with the caste he hated most, the Eclipse Caste, and begged me not to force him to make it. So I let him make a Lunar and instead made an NPC Eclipse caste, essentially there to have a boat that would take them more easily around the world and have the money to keep them well supplied. His name was Marius the Reverent, his back story (which no one cared about) full of sorrow and regret. Despite all that I wrote for him and how many clues I slipped, no one paid him much mind, really. They just kept pushing for the Black Dragon. Even when his servants started calling him Marius the Revenant. No one even noticed.

They get to the Underworld with all the keys, they get to the top of the tower to unlock the door, and they're met by a HUGE and very powerful automaton Dragon, essentially a soulsteel Warstrider in the shape of a dragon, guarding the way.

As the battle commences, two things are quickly realized. One, there is no way they are powerful enough to beat this thing on their own. Even the sorcerer's Celestial level spells barely tickle it. Two, the Eclipse has disappeared.

Who should appear but The Black Dragon and his lackeys, to fight this soulsteel dragon. They do, rather succinctly with all ten of them together, and before the party can attack, the Black Dragon tells them that they were on the same side. The Black Dragon was not their enemy... The EBON Dragon was. The Ebon Dragon is a Yozi, essentially an unborn demigod of death and destruction who wants nothing more than to literally destroy the entire world.

They hurry up the tower, and what should they find in the summoning chamber but Marius the Revenant, summoning the Ebon Dragon using the keys they had all gathered. He had been using them all along to gather what he needed to summon his master, the Ebon Dragon.

Needless to say, after that battle and rather dramatic conclusion of the story, no one took my NPCs lightly anymore. I'll never be able to do it again with this set of players, but it was epic while it lasted.

ok, so one evening, my World of Darkness group got bored. none of us wanted to run our ongoing campaigns, so we just gathered together all the books we had. I had a copy of Freak Legion. I don't know if you are familiar with that particular book, but basically you are a normal human that is having their soul raped by demons. as a result you have supernatural abilities.
so we decide to make super heroes
heroes that would fit in well with the Tick, and his crew.
in the world of darkness
our characters all worked for Pentex, a corporation polluting the earth for evil, and had our own comic book lines, based off of our adventures. and we were fighting the evil Garou, werewolves trying to destroy corporations everywhere. (they were actually trying to prevent the fouling of the planet, but what ever)
and we went round robin, one of us started running the game, until our antics resulted in the current GM no longer being able to breath due to laughter.
the line up was
Fantastico - a shapeshifter who could turn into anything (so long as it was bird related)
titanium Man (also known as Mr. Titanium) - the superman of the group, flight, strength, laser vision, and his name was different based on which comic inspired suit he was in. (one had a cape that hung off of one shoulder, the other around the neck) Dumb as a bag of hammers. (none of his mental attributes was higher then 1 out of a scale of 5) (the name was chosen because titanium was stronger then steel. thus he could beat up superman)
Phoenix with an F - Mr. Titanium's son. think the Human Torch, if the Human Torch's flames were a sickly green that ate away the health of the world.
and Anime Boy - ((so maned because of his electric blue hair) named by Mr. Titanium) the only non-comic book character (at first) his job was PR and keeping the other 3 from destroying the city. he could call forth balls of the green fire, but every time he was exposed to it he would gain new powers and weaknesses, so he tried not to do that. (also he had a car, rather then flight powers)

most of their hijinx involved not killing one another, and general mayhem.
at one point I became the GM and added a plot twist, Mr. T's wife (long thought dead) was in fact still alive! and one of the evil garou! this was explained away by her being genetically fused with the family dog after a microwave mishap involving non-dairy powered creamer.

In one campaign that covered several sessions, each session ended with a Big Bad. Most fell flat, and were the usual cliché super villain, which I played mostly to be amusing, going full tilt with the clichés. Each one even, as they were losing the fight, said, "No! This is impossible! You cannot defeat me! I am invincible!"

Each time they said that, something unrelated to the party would cause their deaths in a humorous fashion. One time, the roof collapsed on the villain. Another time, they got eaten by their pet dragon. Another time, they got struck by three separate lightning bolts at the same time. One even suffered from spontaneous cardiac arrest. It actually reached the point where - in character - the players would sheath their weapons after the line to see what happened.

The last villain they faced actually didn't even fight them. He stood on his raised platform and just stared down at them. "I hope you don't think you can defeat me. All hope for you is lost. I am invincible."

The party sheathed their weapons, the players actually elbowing each other and taking bets on what would happen next.

The villain stood for a while, then tilted his head as if listening. Then he stepped to the right.

The meteorite that flew right through the open skylight barely missed the villain and smashed into the party.

I have plans for this one, but I haven't particularly played D&D enough to have actually gotten it out. I'd just finished going through all the seasons of digimon (that had been dubbed because I did it at work and it's hard to read subtitles and order files at the same time), and I got an idea of my own for a season, which was eventually transferred to a D&D campaign.

The first enemy was a warforged leader of a mercenary military organization. He was using his influence and a vast information network to manipulate the heads of the other countries to try and trigger a war between old enemies.

The second enemy was a Lawful Good Paladin, who was in the process of wiping out entire villages in the midst of celebrating averted war (possibly). The villages are full of typically 'evil' races, and he views them as a blight on the land and a threat. One of these villages is close to the home of a Drow Druid that I had planned to introduce to the party in the first part of the campaign (based on Zecora, actually).

The third, an angry scion of a god. Set to watch his domain while he wandered the world in human form, the scion grew used to his position, and didn't want the god to return. So, he attacks, wanting to take his power while he is vulnerable. The God, weak from a different battle, places his essence within a pendent which finds it way to one of the PCs. The scion proceeds to attack, etc.

The connecting force between the three campaigns would be a very small creature who was working for the warforged, but was abused and angered reached out to the PCs and told them about what was going on. If the Warforged managed to survive the battle, or was able to flee, he would be killed by the creature, and his power absorbed and his body and essence saved within an amulet, kept by the creature. The battle with the Paladin would be interrupted by the creature, and he would suffer the same fate. The Scion would have already fallen under the creature's influence, and was being manipulated into trying to kill the PCs for the amulet, which he wanted, because he had come to view the PCs as a threat.

And then he'd go Windwaker and release the forms of the enemies he'd captured, empowered to kill the PCs, before he follows into the 'If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.'

Of course, these are all just grand DM plans. From what I've heard, the players would probably managed to completely destroy the long term plans before I even manage to introduce the warforged....

There's a fanfic called Time Lords and Terror that crosses over Doctor Who with FiM and makes the Smoze BUCKING TERRIFYING. I highly reccomend it!
Hmm... converting it into a module couldn't be too hard... Welp, I know what I'm doing tomorrow night!

I actually have an awesome plan for that! Are you ready, because this is gonna blow your minds.

Raxon is actually planning what is quite possibly the most insidious villainy in the history of the world. He plans to... End world hunger. By force.

No, he's not going to kill everyone until there are plenty of mouths to feed, or take over all of farming and distribution, or anything so mundane. He's going to make Saturn's moons edible.

You heard that right. Raxon is planning to put entire moons into thhe biggest white rooms you can't even comprehend, and then modify them on an atomic level into organic protein and carbohydrate pastes. They're very simple, somewhat bitter, tasteless edibles. His plan is to create a magical symbiont that melds with each person, and acts as a beacon. Anyone with this beacon has the food substitute paste automatically teleported into their stomach three times every 24 hours.

Eeeyup. Raxon plans to overpopulate the earth by making it so nobody ever has to worry about going hungry, thereby allowing more time for... recreational procreation. Then, in a hundred years, when the Earth's population has tripled or more, Raxon will then begin offering to allow people to go live on other planets he's terraformed.

This has all the earmarks of a really good idea, with one fatal flaw. Humans are highly intelligent, and can do things like use condoms. However, I like to think that he could probably succeed on his diplomacy checks to convince the world that since he basically used small planets, the food supply on Earth will never run out, and that he can handle population numbers himself. Also, the fact that he makes this plan, and it doesn't really gain him anything of value.

Money? Pffft. He can craft virtually anything, or replicate almost any tech with a magical equivalent.

Power? HE CAN STEAL MOONS OUT OF ORBIT!

Ego? His own ego is kept carefully in check.

So, what does he get out of the deal?

Security. If there's a cosmic event that wipes out the Earth, he wants the human race to survive. Ergo, he is taking steps to that end. He is actually planning to do something horrible for the greater good. For the human race. As a whole. In the long run.

Spoiler warning: Earth is filled with superheroes who will all think this is the dumbest idea ever. Sure, there's merit in colonizing other planets to make sure the human race survives, but Raxon's plan is just so overcomplicated.

"This is the dumbest plan I have ever seen."

"But people are dumb, and nobody listens to conspiracy theorists."

"Raxon... No. Just no. Solving world hunger isn't going to make the population explode. Turning the entire world into one giant slum is bad."

He's powerful, but it's still gonna take awhile to rewrite the genetic structures for an entire planet.

First, he has to wipe out all life, and replace it with human-compatible vegetation and animal life. It is a logistically difficult and time consuming process. After the planet's been seeded, he has to wait for it to be ready for these colonists.

Would you like to hear about his long term idea for creating unlimited energy?

He's going to steal an antimatter star, and teleport-collide it with a regular sun, and collect all the energy they give off from with a dyson sphere.

Nobody wants him to try. If he fails, he may have just created the biggest shrapnel grenade in the universe. If he succeeds, Raxon Dunwich would have nigh unlimited energy reserves. Which he probably couldn't use, seeing as how all his stuff is magitek.

For the first adventure of a campain, our villen was an evil alchimist in his fiendish lair. The first round, I grabed a potion and tossed it at him,lighting him on fire; the fighter threw somthing else at him and crit; and while the alchemist was doubled over in pain,the archer crit with her bow. As there was only one posible place to crit on him while hunched over like that, it went strait through the top of his head. Quickest boss battle ever.

I actually designed a Chrysalis-kinda villain a few years ago as part of a sub-mission of a campaign I was a player of. She was supposed to be a spymaster sorta character, who wanted to gain a kingdom for herself by impersonating the king's son's bride. I never got to play it though, because our party was wiped two sessions before my turn would've come. It's still on my shelves though.

A villain that fell flat was a top level assassin my group and I encountered while trying to shut down a blood cult hiding out in a fortress that may or may not have been alien in origin (it had a demonic missile in the basement!) For some reason I have yet to gather, he decided to take a nap in a room turned zone of silence, guarded solely by two Anti-Paladins (as me and another member of the group were paladins, this didn't bode well).

Cue us spending the next hour or so looking for a back way in (which is when we stumbled upon the missile I mentioned previously). So we sneak into the room and since it's silenced the guards are oblivious to our presence. The Magus of our group pulls out his weapon, throws on a few buffers and strikes.

Rolls a critical. Lops the assassin's head off in one clean strike. Of course, that not only deactivated the zone of silence, but alerted the guards that we'd just killed their master. They weren't much trouble either, the big bad of the cult did kinda make up for it after he bound his soul to a demon and damn near killed the entire party.

I have had so many interesting villains in my games. Villains players loved to hate, villains players couldn't help but love, and villains that made the players for several days after the game occasionally stop and just think "… we… were the ending of a true legacy. I'm not even sure if that was a good thing."

But I think my far my best villain was Fox.

It was a bronze age game, low-magic setting with spiritual and shamanic backdrops. The land is full of powerful spirits, each on representing a force or an idea. There were spirits of life, death, family, tides, summer, winter, suffocation- there was a spirit of just about anything and they all chose to represent themselves as animals. Fox was an arctic fox, smooth and with a deep voice, kind and always curious, always smiling. He'd answer a question if you just gave him some meat to eat. He grew close with the two player characters Hunter and Carpenter. He shared secrets with them along the way.

"Fox knows," he said with his smooth voice, "Fox knows many things, many secrets… and for a token to eat, Fox will tell."

Why could Fox do this? Because Fox was the spirit of Fate itself. Every spirit they crossed warned them never to trust Fox, never to allow him too close. No other spirit liked him for his wiles and his willingness to share just about any secret he knew- and as an agent of Fate he knew everything. So then, why would two brilliant players and characters trust someone like that? Because Fox was entirely INCAPABLE of lying.

And so Fox, never telling a lie the whole time, guided the party gently with hints and secrets. There was hell coming to the land in the forms of the spirits of Butterfly (Personified Day and Fire, and Summer) and Owl (Personified Night and Cold, and Winter). Owl had overhunted her territory to the far north and needed to come south or starve. If she came south, so would a crippling frost. Butterfly flew up from the equator to stop her, but wherever he came fires would start and volcanoes would make themselves known. The powers they had over Fire, Cold, Summer, and Winter were stolen elements, not theirs to have, and as such could not control them.

Fox guided the party the whole way, showing them how to weaken Butterfly and Owl so that the powers of Summer and Winter could be stolen from them, because Fox Knows… and who better to steal them than Fate himself? Of course, he knew this would happen and he didn't tell them that he wanted the powers for himself, seeing such amazing powers as something that belonged rightfully to a knower of destiny.

And so the powers of Fate, Knowledge, Fire, Ice, Summer, and Winter fell into Fox's able hands. Butterfly and Owl went back to their normal power and flew away, terrified and humiliated. Game over, right?

Wrong. I had the players genuinely convinced that Fox was on their side… right up until he never returned for them. He never came to give the powers back to their rightful owners. He never returned. Elk, he spirit of the Tundra (one who had warned them not to trust Fox) was outraged by this, and he knew that Fox was going to ascend to something beyond godly. He knew everything, past, future, and present, and now he also had the cycle of the very world in his hands. He had near absolute power- short of creation himself, Fox was god. Fox Knows.

The thing was, Fox did have ONE drawback to his Fate powers. If you knew everything all the time, everything that was and all that would be, you'd go insane. Fox actually always spoke in the third person to remind himself of who he was so he'd never get lost, so there was weakness in his power. The way Fox would tell future or past was simply by this: asking about it. He could ask the world itself about its future, about its past, and when he looked he could find whatever answers he wants. Ask Fox a question and the second it crosses his mind he immediately answers it.

They called on Fox again, one of the characters actually nearly killed himself doing so, because despite the fact that Fox had become nearly all-powerful, he was not without some compassion. He came to Carpenter's side as he was about to die, and Carpenter whispered these words to him:

"Fox, what don't you know?"

Ouch.

The players, the characters, everyone loved Fox, but he was indeed the villain of the game. He manipulated the party the entire game and yet at the end did not leave the players or characters with feelings of hate or bile towards him. It was beautiful. Balance was restored, but Fox was killed in the process. No one was happy about it, but occasionally it happens. Of course, there will always be an agent of Fate… someone always needs to know.

And to this day, occasionally my games will be haunted with the polite, soft whisper

In one campaign we were resurrected to start things off by a mad scientist in the employ of an insanely paranoid demigod who had power over nightmares.

I'm pretty sure they were both supposed to be villains, but we played it straight. Even after they betrayed us and tried to have us killed. "Well, of course she tried to have us killed. She's insanely paranoid. That doesn't mean she can't be our ally. We'd better go save her from the Unicorn of Purity! We can't let what happened to the Land of Corruption happen to the Land of Nightmares!"

The God of Ruin and Pestilence: had one highpriest who fixed the Rod of Ruin and summoned him. He was too difficult to fight so we summoned our gods to help. Mostly memorable due to my brother's character's pre-fight pep-talk of "Well look on the bright side- he's a god, so he MUST be overconfident."

Orc- Orc was a side villain. We started 10th level, he was 20th. Somehow he never defeated us... Well, to be fair, he was incredibly stupid. He was the highpriest to Bahgtru, the CE orc god of Strength, Loyalty... and stupidity. He had 1 intelligence, only spoke orc, and managed to be so stupid he actually warped reality. While we never actually fought him, he messed up with our party through merging with Miskatonic University and marrying us together (mostly the party members who hated each other). ...He wasn't that effective a villain. But it took all players plus myself to roleplay him, and he was hilarious.

'Evil Necromancer'- we once were sent to fight an evil necromancer. After fighting all his legions, we found him in his room holding the terrasque at bay. We politely apologized and excused ourselves.

The most memorable villain I metwas David Daark. He was a son of deseased king and he lost his heart, making him want to take a throne by any means. He also had a twin brother, who was also called David and was our employer. David Daark managed to impersonate good David several times (or was it just one time?), so we needed to be on guard for this. Later we learned, that the heart could change between twins, making a good one into an evil and vice versa, so we could never be absolutely sure which one is Daark now.
He also once brainwashed a player's character to be evil (that one was already sociopatic enough). Also, as good David summoned his champions from another worlds (us, the party), Daark summoned several villains from another worlds as well. One of them was evil bard that had the power to make people recognise the fourth wall. That bard could sing a song and all NPCs nearby was just lying on the ground in misery of knowing their status of minor character.

The most UNmemorable villain I met was from Touhou module. I don't even remember her name, because we met her only once, at the end of campain. Diring the whole campain I never found a single clue to her plan and I have absolutely no idea what did she want. She was just an insanely powerful last boss to justify 10+ people gathered together for kicking her ass. And when the party defeated her, they learned that she was really a baby. Well effing cheers!

Well, no one from the game will remember him, but he was the first villain I ever created to GM a game.

Half-Life: sort of a mix of Radiation Man and iron man (yes, a mutated Gordon Freeman in a powersuit). He had a horde of irradiated, mutated animals under his control, which I did not know how to scale properly...so...they were all really easy to beat...Now I remember why no one remembers him...

Well, I do have this one guy I'm working on now for the current game. I'm pretty confident my players don't come to this site so I'll go ahead and spoil this.

I'm running a game in Mini-Six, (got a newbie, so didn't want to go too deep) where we have a shadowrun-ish setting where things are steampunk rather than cyberpunk. And my two victi-I mean players have gotten in contact with an elf sheriff.

This sheriff has 8d6 in guns.

Right now, they are working together to track down the killers of this young girl that was childhood friends with the players. They're some mysterious cult, and it just so happens that the sheriff is a member of said cult, and the cult needs two young souls to complete the ritual to summon their Cthulhu. Enter players.

I ran a game of Ironclaw for a long time, such that the players ended up gaining a lot of power. They ended up getting rather full of themselves, and opted to go into a large swamp to try to take down a known necromancer, and widowed wife of the late king... Widowed because she murdered the king and eldest two sons and drove the remaining heir insane.

Going on into the swamp, they managed to power their way into the home of the Witch, took out her guards, and set her house on fire... but she wasn't there.

They investigated further, and found she had fled. Naturally they pursued... Only to find that she fled to the rest of her coven. While they were ready to take on a Necromancer, they weren't prepared to take on nine. They took out one, but were overwhelmed by the rest.

Barely managing to escape with their lives, the party went on to follow the main campaign goal, which was to garner support for the now sane heir, in order to resist the forces of a pretender who was placed on the throne. In the course of their travels, they ran into Vaslov. Vaslov was a blue-haired bishi boy, and eldest son of the Witch they had messed with. He had his own designs, not quite in opposition to the party, but also not in favor of them. He didn't much like his mother, but still was completely and utterly evil.

What made him very scary was that he was well trained as both a Paladin, and a Necromancer. White and Black magic combined in a very powerful manner.

The party ended up facing off against Vaslov, and the party's most powerful mage challenged V to a one-on-one duel.
Baron Innocence the Third was a master air mage, known for his quick and powerful use of lightning bolts.

Vaslov and Innocence faced off at 100 paces away. Vaslov started walking fortward, his holy sword drawn and held out to the side. Innocence waited... Vaslov kept walking. Once V got in range, Innocence smashed him with a lightning bolt. Vaslov kept walking.
Innocence unleashed another lightning bolt, striking the villain. Vaslov moved his sword to point directly behind him and started running (you could almost see the speed lines behind him). Innocence unleashed yet another lightning bolt, directly striking Vaslov. Unseen to everyone, Vaslov used a white-magic prayer to release a powerful black-magic spell on Innocence, who ended up completely paralyzed.

Vaslov ran right up to Innocence and stopped, chest to chest, sword still held out straight back. Into the wizard's ear he whispered "I win," then gave a light push, knocking the baron helplessly onto his back. Vaslov walked away with his goons... not revealing that he was rather heavily wounded, having covered the results of grievous damage with white magic spells.

From that point on, all I had to do to cause panic in my players was get out my Vaslov miniature.

Buddy of mine was running an online 3.5 campaign and one of his groups (he was running the adventure parallel a couple of times) was progressing alot to fast for his liking so he asked them if they minded he bring in a new player.

(that player being me ofcourse)

So there i was building a super sweet warforged juggernaught who had survived the entire war on ebberon and taken employ as a mercenary for the dragon (I was basically the dragon's dragon in TVTropes speak). So they survived half the bloody dungeon and come out this long as straight down waterpipe and run into a room with a huge door and one warforged going. "I was waiting for you, see the problem is that in the next room theres 2 bone Naga's and i cant take them alone". (not even lieing i had spent all my 200k equipment budget becoming iron man with eyelasers and flight and such)

So with this being DND and not Vampire or something they immediately believe i am on their side without even a cursory "who are you and how the hell did you get halfway down the deadliest dungeon in the world solo?"

So we waltz into bone naga room, my character pretending to run into a trap on the door and "i make some sparks fly out of my arm and turn off the eyelights" so they run in get hosed even with me helping (and actually doing some fairly ok damage) and they bail.

8 hours of rest later i post the following text in the game channel

"guys, i dont mean to rush you or anything but i think you might be missing a giant adamantium killstick."

At which point they mount a rescue expedition for a guy who was at that point giving the monsters their annual performance review.

Game didn't last much longer after that because i would have enjoyed causing a few "accidents" to the players... I mean just cutting them in half while they sleep isn't really fun but accidentally throwing someone a bit to hard and bouncing them off the backing of that ridge they cant jump to... That's something else..."

I have this... thing I'm working on.
I've been basically putting together a game system for a few years. Despite my incredible lazyness, it has reached the point where it is playable enough that I can test it out.(Which is extremely informative; I basically remade the whole thing several times since I've begun the playtests)
Anyway, for said tests, I put together a little campaign and roped my usual DM as well as my brother to be the players.
Both my immeasurable sloth-itude and few times to get the three of us together regularly means I don't do this often, but there's one thing that really makes me want to see the campaign through to the end: The bad guy. Hooo boy did I plan an awesome twist for the bad guy.
I'm pretty sure none of them will ever read this, so I'll just go ahead and spoil it here.
The first game we did had the heroes starting out in a small backwater region, near a cluster of small towns. said towns shared a local place of worship, and a common graveyard. The place of worship, known as the cave of ahm, had been corrupted by an evil influence. The heroes dealt with it. While celebrating, they were interrupted by a villager from another town, seeking help to repel a bandit raid in his hometown.
They went there and defeated the bandits. Among the bandit's things, they found a small, odd key made of bone. they felt it was special in some way and decided to keep it.
Upon returning to the ahm communities, they were told that the temporary corruption to the cave had awakened the dead resting in the graveyard. No big deal; they went to kill the few zombies and such.
In the graveyard, the undead were swiftly taken care of, until they found a strange mausoleum. When they got closer, the bone key acted up, making them feel something odd about the crypt. They inspected it, and found that there was a door, whose lock matched the key perfectly and opened. Down below, the tunnels were literally packed full of zombies and other undead, all perfectly placid and letting the heroes pass unhindered. At the end of the tunnels, they came to a single stone tomb. as soon as they were in front of it, it exploded, revealing the big bad.
Kaltos, the lord of bones, was waiting. with a simple jedi-like move of his hand, the key floated to him, and he thanked them for so kindly bringing him the fabled Skeleton Key. As soon as he had it, he cast a destination-less teleport, sending them to a random point in the universe. The plot decided that that point was a desert somewhere.
In that desert, they met a mystical nomadic tribe of mystical mystics, whose extremely knowledgeable leader told them that he knew a bit of what was going on. After telling him their side of the story, he told them what had just happened, and who that Kaltos dude was.
Kaltos was, long ago, a powerful wizard. He was also powerfully deranged, afflicted with an obsession for bones that soon consumed his life. For him, bones were everything, the only real truth of any man. His obsession soon made him deal with necromantic cults, until it finally culminated in his transformation into the abomination the party had met. The great scribe (the nomad mystics leader) called it an ascended bone lich, for lack of a better term, as no-one before Kaltos or since had ever accomplished the same thing.
After his "death", Kaltos had rampaged across the land, apparently looking for something before vanishing without a trace some 400 years ago.
When they told him of the skeleton key, the mystic nodded knowingly and revealed that the party had been used as pawns by an ancient and powerful magic. He told them that Kaltos had cast an epically powerful spell that basically turned the skeleton key into the one ring to his Sauron: a dark will orchestrating a series of coincidences and accidents that would eventually lead the key straight to Kaltos. Looking for it was too hard, so he had decided to just cast the spell and wait for the key to come to him instead.
The corruption in the cave? The spell made it happen. The bandit raid? The spell made it happen. The party wiping the bandits and taking the key? The. spell. made. it. happen. The party had been pawns of Kaltos' plans all along.
After that little reveal to motivate them into going after Kaltos instead of jumping off the rails, I started paving the way for the players to track him down and eventually put a stop to his evil plans.
That's where the campaign is at as of now.
But the fun part? All of this, this whole quest and everything Kaltos has done? It's all a red herring, a decoy for what's really going on. None of that is the real twist.
When they finally defeat Kaltos and kill him for good, the party will hear him say something like "oh gods, I didn't know. I didn't know! This... this is glorious! AH! Ahahaha!" in a surprised but exhilarated voice. He will then crumble into a bone-tingling shockwave that the entire world will feel.
When they return to the great mystic, he will tell them what, being much more knowing of religious affairs, he felt that shockwave as being divine in nature.
And that's when I'll explain how gods work in my setting.
Gods are basically physical and spiritual embodiments of the metaphysical concepts of their domains. Like, a god of nature is basically the idea of nature itself; If one were to destroy nature entirely, the god would die. Likewise, if there was a god of... Ipads or something, the only way to truly kill that god would be to erase the very existence of Ipads from the entire universe. Just thinking about something gives a little bit of power to the god of that something.
The gods of that world are as fueled by their domains as the domains are fueled by those gods.
When Kaltos killed himself centuries ago, he actually fused his very essence with the very concept of bones. He was the only man in existence who was obsessed with bones enough that reversing the flow turned him into the god of bones.
The one thing he needed to complete his ascension was to shed his mortal body in order to let his soul realize its divinity. Killing him will have done just that.
Kaltos was a god all along, and no one in the universe knew.(except for the other gods)
The look on their faces when they realize that they never stopped being pawns of Kaltos' destiny will be awesome.
And I hope they'll remember for a long time the day where a group of good heroes helped an evil lord ascend to godhood.

The villains of last night Shadowrun game fell flat... or rather, exploded, got run over, then fell flat.

The situation: The party's mission is to deliver an envelope of important documents to the mafia leader across town. Other syndicates want these documents, but the PCs have no idea what they're carrying (Hint: really freakin' valuable documents).

For some reason, halfway through the trip the team combat medic gets a case of the munchies. The party stops at a Stuffer Shack (7-11 kinda place). Medic walks in and buys stuff.
Meanwhile, three Yakuza suits and three Triad suits approach the car where the other players are just chillin'. None of the syndicates have visible weapons and they're all being casual so as not to worry the PCs.

The medic sees this, pulls out his M203, and fires one at the Yakuza group. The Yakuza are standing by the team's car!! So one Yakuza turns into salsa, the other two are critically injured, and the party car gets it's driver-side windows shattered. Had the car not been armored, the PCs inside would have been getting intimate with the car's steel frame.

The sniper in the car leans out the broken window and throws a flash-bang grenade out at the remaining Yakuza. The hacker and mage open up with gunfire on the Triads, riddling them full of holes. The team driver freaks out and puts the car into reverse, running over one of the Triad goons and breaking his leg. The team peels out of the parking lot and the medic jumps on his motorcycle to follow, leaving behind 5 really bloody syndicates and one bowl of chunky salsa behind.
Only one of the six enemies ever got to defend themselves.

I ran a Pokemon tabletop a while back and the party had to square off against a Snagger/Engineer named Roque Guinart. The guy was a total cocky arrogant smart ass. The funny thing is instead of killing him the party ended up helping him out he ended up being a big ally in the campaign, at least when they could convince him to get off his ass.

In "Carrion Crown", the Pathfinder campaign my friends and I are in, our first major story arc involves venturing into a haunted prison and defeating the ghosts of the five worst prisoners in it before they break free and overwhelm the neighboring town.

So far, the most memorable of the five is the only one we haven't faced yet. The ghost of the Splatter Man, a mage who used blood magic and power of names to kill his victims when he was still alive, has been harassing the group and town far beyond simply sitting in the prison and threatening to break out. He's been possessing townspeople to do his bidding, taunting us, and in the last session he sent a giant mashup of zombie corpses at us after our characters were already rather depleted from a very long and difficult boss fight with one of the other ghosts. This has resulted in our characters (mostly mine) bantering right back at him like he's a comic book supervillain at every opportunity.

By far the one that fell the flattest in the same campaign was the third boss-ghost we faced, the Mosswater Marauder. He had the skulls of his former victims attack us, and remained pretty much invincible as long as they were active... or at least he would have, if Chekyl (my tengu alchemist) hadn't Holy Water'd the skulls into oblivion in the first two turns, before any of us even tried to attack him. After that, he folded like paper, much to the aggravation of our GM.

The Lotus was a mysterious individual who evaded authorities for years. Most of his minions were blackmailed into his service, and he had quite an extensive network. The PCs actually got reeled into his web of crimes, and decided to work together to find this guy. They figured out which city the Lotus operated out of, and spent years there trying to find him. They got a lot of good advice from an innkeeper who allowed them to stay at his inn, because he was also being blackmailed by the Lotus.

They finally busted in on a deal where the Lotus himself was supposed to show up. Much to their surprise, sitting at the head of the table was the the innkeeper. Even after he admitted to being the Lotus to them, they still didn't believe it. They figured that he must have been sent by the Lotus as part of his blackmail to throw the PCs off and make them feel betrayed. They determined that their assumption was wrong after they woke up in a dungeon cell.

The innkeeper though was just an Expert. I proved in that campaign that fifteen levels in an NPC class and a Ring of Glibness can be quite effective.

I find my most memorable villains tend to be so accidentally. I've certainly had good villains that the PCs love to hate, but my most memorable one was a bard named Nikki. Just by virtue of being a bard, rather than fight the PCs directly he'd stand in as safe a spot as he could, play music, and make fun of the PCs while they were fighting someone else, so even though he was just one member of the Quirky Miniboss Squad (not even one of the two real big bads), he was memorable and the PCs loathed him so much that he wound up returning while the other members of his team did not. (Fun fact: it's easy to have recurring villains in a game where Raise Dead is a thing. The PCs killed him three times before they finally got rid of him for good)

I had a couple of memorable villains over the years. My favorite <facepalm> villainess was created to be a one-shot deal.

The cleric was the child of a follower of the Goddess of Art, Beauty and Prophecy. The child was taken and suborned by a demon lord who raised her as their own follower. The child became a cleric of said demon lord, but was able to hide her identity by using a trinket mass-sold by a True Neutral God who'd let anyone ask him for power because it boosted his personal power base. More worshipers = more power. Who cares if they also serve other alignments?

Anyway, the cleric was working for a guy who was arming the demihumans and teaching them to be an army. To weaken the human and elven societies, they had introduced a narcotic which causes uncontrollable rage issues if you go into withdrawal, and sold it for coppers on the streets. The PC's inevitably unraveled the conspiracy, and captured the cleric. But did they kill her, or imprison her? NO....

Instead, the impressionable young elven mage girl, who had been seduced by the evil cleric girl, fought hard to keep the evil cleric in the party, so she could be shown the error of her ways and redeemed. The player put *so much effort* into it, that I just had to let it happen. The cleric wound up the main healing NPC for the entire campaign...

I had 'The Golden General' the name wasn't great, and the general knew it. She was actually ostensibly an ally of the players (or at least their manager.) That didn't stop her from sending robots after them, blowing up the train they were on, tricking them into wandering into an expy of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, or making the PCs fight a squadron of ninjas... underwater. Her motivation for all this? An excess of robots, a need for testing, a train scheduled for decommissioning, ninjas she wanted to get out of paying, and SHEER BOREDOM.

While initially very frustrating, the character made herself memorable during and after the players' fight with her. The fight itself was the best of the campaign, with her strategy of fighting in a field of weapons making for some interesting combos. It was after the fight that she just kind of quietly agreed to help the party and walked off smiling. After the battle (and subsequent anticlimax), she endeared herself by revealing that the parts of her secret base that were skipped were actually an AWESOME AMUSEMENT PARK (and also by getting a few deadpan lines out.)

Story wise, the villain was just okay - and could even be considered 'filler' against the overarching plotline. However, the fact that mechanics and writing managed to blend perfectly in a way that gave player and npc plenty of opportunities to do something very impressive made the conflict and its initiator much more memorable.

We've had a villain who if I remember correctly is actually still alive somewhere.

This guy was a brilliant wizard with more contingency plans than tunnels in an ant hill. There were even contingency plans within contingency plans for so many levels it was ludicrous. He planned for any combination of things to go wrong in his plans. He even had a plan if the world just decided to end or the moon exploded or crashed into the planet while he was enacting his plan. He was just a tad bit insane.

He's literally kept us at bay for 10 years now, and even then we still haven't actually defeated him. One of his greatest attempts at stopping us involved mind control spells on half our party and forcing us to fight each other while he got away. That fight went on for 15 minutes while we're trying to not kill the controlled guys but not die ourselves. The guy managed to take over a continent, built magic conductive towers all over the place to enhance his magic strength, and basically pronounced himself as a new god. He kept this position for a solid 5 years before we managed to build up enough of a force to take him down, and even then he's still roaming free.

I'd have to say our most memorable villain was someone the PC's didn't even know was a villain. Someone they trusted, and who sent them on their very first set of quests and became a sort of "Team dad" for the party.
Pete, the halforc, ex-monk tavernkeeper. Agent of Ssendam, Lord of Madness.
He would send the party off to "Inadvertently" sow chaos in his master's name, and saw them as his children.
Acting as a liaison with the city officials, he sent them to gather artifacts "in the service of *Random other god's name here* to secure the realm." Until he had everything he needed to summon his Slaad lord master in the middle of the city's version of Carnival.
The players were so floored by it they spent most of the session trying to talk him down, utterly convinced he was possessed.
It lasted until the point in the ritual where Pete had to sacrifice the barmaid (Who he had protected from ruffians at the bar "To keep her purity intact" as a poppa bear moment waaaay before.) for them to realize how twisted he was.

Long-running Champions game, in which my character - a dimension-hopping gnoll sorcerer (don't ask how he managed to start in AD&D, and subsequently appeared in Cthulhu, Champions, Rogue Trader and card games) - attracted the attention of one of the BIG Bads of the Champions universe.

But at least Dr Destroyer sent the PC a polite invitation to his own execution first. Vitus the Gnoll just a politely sent a letter back, graciously declining this offer, but understanding entirely why Destroyer thought he was a threat to the dimensional integrity of the universe, but that he had the problem in hand. Destroyer disagreed, but at least gave Vitus a few days to put his affairs in order.

The resulting battle did take Destroyer (and large chunks of the city) down, mostly because he was getting so annoyed with Vitus he stopped paying attention to the rest of the party - but then he came back a few months later. As a reanimated super-corpse, powered by the Great Old Ones.

I once made a bureaucrat for an online RPG game for kicks and giggles. She was a rather nasty bookworm sarcastic so much that you could condense it from the aura, and pretty much 0 battles.

She once was greeting the hero band after an event of an orc tribe building their camp town near the main route which they disposed. I talked to the DM if all sentient creatures are protected by law. It was a yes, so my character stopped the heroes... And charged them for killing innocent orcs, old ones, young ones, women and unarmed men as well. The DM was genuely shocked by this dark twist from a Lawful Neutral, then I replied: "All laws must be held. They did not made any aggressive steps, but this bunch of criminals burned down an illegal settlement which would have been tried to be negotiated with."
Since that, the heroes had to pay for the town hall and arm the militia with lances (another thing off-screen).

They called me the local antagonist, but sadly the server stopped before such a plot line could have been made.

The greatest villain I have created so far was for my super-hero game during a world war 2 setting. He was a corrupted paragon called Ubermensch. For a quick descriptor think Superman if he had been corrupted to the core by Nazi philosophy. His first appearance gave the players a run for their money since he was virtually immune to the damage that any of them could deal alone. However what turned him into a great villain was his second appearance. The party had allied themselves and formed a bond with two brothers who had been forced to work for the Nazis. One was a brilliant scientist Named Captain Cog and the other was effectively the german equivalent of Pinocchio named Kas. They were going to the Cog's castle in the heart of the Black Forest so that they could retrieve some paintings that he had taken to keep them out of Nazi hands and to sneak the brothers out of Germany.

Everything went according to plan until they got to the castle which was crawling with Nazis. Cog's henchmen snuck them in a back entrance and they put on disguises to blend in. Well Ubermensch wound up being there (along with several other villains) and saw through their disguises and it turned into an all out brawl that almost crashed the castle on top of them.

In the fight Ubermensch left to deal with the traitorous scientist and puppet. And here is where Ubermensch went from a tough challenge to the most hated villain in a my game. He went to Kas (who had been established to have been almost like a child) and ripped out his inner working mechanics causing it to scream in pain. (which pissed my players off to no end) He then went to Cog while still holding the puppet and threw him into a vat of molten brass almost killing him instantly (thank you natural 20's). Ubermensch then proceeded to flee the battle taking Kas with him. The Campaign is still going and now the entire party wants to utterly destroy Ubermensch at whatever the cost.

As for the villain who went flat look no further then Captan Cog and Kas themselves. Cog was intended to be a totally badass Steampunk Nazi super scientist brain in a clockwork mech-suit in my modern day game who had been put in a state of suspended animation since the end of WW2 and all his scientific theories had been stolen and used to fuel the technological age between the end of the war (the manhattan project) to things as far into the future as late 1990's. Unfortunately I wound up sitting on the character for too long and he developed a really in depth backstory leading him to become a great vengeful mad scientist.

Unfortunately, The first Super-heroes he fights happened to be his grandsons and he wound up retiring from being a villain to spend time with his family and to finally meet his son (someone who he hadn't seen since the son was a baby).

Kas was going to be an awesome killer puppet assassin using killer toys to do his bidding (kinda like Toy Man from the Superman comics) Kas happened to be situated in a village that was local to Captain Cog's castle. A player then had to open his big mouth and asked "is he related to Captain Cog?" To which I dumbly replied "Yes" and there went Kas as a villain.

I have since discovered that my players are super-villain conversion factories. Awesome villains go in and allies come out.

Not really a villain, but there was a character that most of the players remember rather well.

Rengo De Gobbo

He was a goblin wizard originally (by the end of the campaign, he'd been reworked as an artificer) who wasn't really the smartest or having the best of luck. He was very good at making things, and just had the slightest problem of being both absentminded about the end results and being extremely cheap about how he'd do it due to his constantly cash poor state.

Originally, his workshop was just a place where the players could get some low level potions and similar things, but that changed with the bakery golem incident.

The players had their haul back of loot, and Rengo bought the partially completed section of an iron golem off of them in exchange for his help in figuring out what the magical stuff they'd dug up was.

Now, the players then had to deal with an attempted bank robbery, which their battle with some local thugs was disrupted by the reconfigured golem that the goblin had repaired and built as both a baker and oven...unfortunately he had forgotten to deal with the existing orders of the original owner who had sicc'd it on the players.

So with a battle cry of "Crush...kill...destroy...bake cookies..." it kool-aid man'd its way through the wall and into the chaos.

Then after the party had moved on, they'd largely forgotten about him until they got an invite aboard a new airship transit service by an old friend, they remembered him after the reintroduction and the fact that it was a rocket powered zepplin, that he'd forgotten to figure out how to safely land after takeoff...

He also cameo'd later on after developing a fully functioning jetpack...that was intended for a normal sized character and he didn't quite adjust the straps for his smaller size...leading to him being dragged across the sky while clutching the straps for dear life...

The players started laughing hysterically when he got goblinnapped by the main villain to make weapons for him...

"What's the opposite of 'magic', anyway?"
Thought this was interesting - in Changeling: the dreaming they have 'banality' which is kind of like that. Don't know much about it though. It's this force that sort of drains changeling magic by sheer banality (basically like saying i don't believe in fairies, that kind of thing.

The Invincable Overlord. So, my group was playing an evil campaign and the Overlord hired us up to fight in a battle for him. Turns out we were against an army and the Overlord didn't see fit to give us any back up. Naturally, we won thanks to our OP items. When we got back to claim our prize, he didn't want to pay us, so he sent us to another realm made of...IDK, this stuff that screws up magic and is more combustible than napalm. One of our players asked his god for help and instead got a ticking firebomb. Yay. Our planeswalker/bard made us a portal to the Overlords throne room just in time for us to get through and out of the way as the nuclear-level blast shot out and killed the Invincible Overlord. I guess he didn't live up to his name. I'll admit he was pretty generic, but his work ethics and death were pretty memorable.

he had like a army backing him up and the guy who brought us to him tricked us to leave our weapons and he like hit my character in the chest with a bolt of evil magic....it was the worst game I ever played..i mean I get the characters have to face stronger then them bosses and work together but if the boss has a army then spread them evenly atleast so the characters have a chance don't put them all together so they can cluster F@@@@ the crap out of everyone.

I run a homebrew system, a sort of fantasy-kitchen-sink set in a modern day setting- magic and wizards and dragons and mad scientists and supervillains and anime-style-martial-arts. While we'd been running a fairly silly ship up to that point (overly-affectionate velociraptors! sensibly-dressed magical girls! fairies that fire lasers bigger than themselves!), I decided to start sliding things toward the more serious end and get some actual plot going.
Enter my villain, who has become the source of many player headaches.
Hitaki is a sadistic sorceress who, at the start of the story, had been safely sealed away. The party was disabled by a fanatical mage who paralyzed them and kidnapped my GM-controlled player character. They got the powerful retired-superhero NPC to help them follow his trail to where she was sealed in an attempt to liberate their friend... naturally, suspicious of the trap. Hitaki, predictably, was unsealed with a blood sacrifice right as they got there.
Unpredictably, the mage wanted the hero there.
Hitaki's first action, upon revival, was to sucker-blast the hero and lock her in a field of pure agony for her involvement in the sealing process. The second was laying waste to the party who recognized she was a powerful character and therefore worth a lot of XP, and launched an immediate attack on her. The third, after the mage asked for his reward for luring the hero to her? She turned him into a chocolate figure, bit his head off, and tossed the rest away.
She then proceeded to perma-kill my GM-controlled player character, then steal (literally) the heart of another PC, leaving a spell in its place that left him alive, but would instantly kill him if she ever destroyed his heart. And then she walked off with a cute parting shot, leaving them with a dead friend, next to zero health, and a superhero- who herself had been introduced a few sessions back as near-impossible to take down- to rescue from a space made of pure pain.
Hitaki has since spent most of her in-game time completely trolling the heroes- teleporting supervillains away from finishing blows, mocking the party at every step, making bad situations even worse. She once even forced them to kill one of their own, while the universe was collapsing around them, before she agreed to lend a hand in their escape- and unfortunately, they needed her power to complete the escape portal. Their hatred for Hitaki is deep and personal... and they've just reached a level at which they can face her head-on in combat and win.
The next couple of game sessions are going to be fun.

The most memorable villains my group faced were: A necromancer that my dwarf bard(who does nothing but be drunk when its inconvenient) killed before he could take center stage for the next arc, The Queen of the giants who was defeated by our human Ranger making a "roll for dick size"(natural 20 by the way) apparently he's now the king of giants, and A priest who replaced the previously mentioned necromancer as that arc's primary villain(He tried to enslave the continent's capital and use our Tiefling Thief as a vessel for his dark mistress.)